With Georgia O Keeffe on her mind this time around, designer Nicholas Kunz painted a promising picture of Nicholas K s evolution. While keeping her line s cool, utilitarian signatures—a desert palette, outerwear focus, draped knits and jerseys, heavy layering—on display, Kunz pushed her men s and women s clothes in a more geometric direction, and went some distance toward elevating the tone of the 9-year-old brand.
Kunz s inspiration for the season was the Taos artists of the twenties and thirties, and it proved to be a smart one. It related easily to Nicholas K s desert fixation, and it hewed the collections, slightly, to the larger Depression-era narrative shaping up for Fall. Kunz has sometimes found it a challenge to integrate current trends, but the Taos theme allowed her to add to her brand s vocabulary, pulling in both western and Deco references. One of Kunz s most interesting ideas was to tie the two together through the use of fringe; the western part of that worked, resulting in easy, fringed dresses with crochet detailing and sharply cut leather jackets jangling with fringe. The more evening-oriented beaded, flapper-ish stuff, meanwhile, felt a little forced. Kunz had more success with her lightly printed silks, iterated as clean and sexy bias-cut dresses and tops.
The menswear collection made its own move into more formal territory, notably with the inclusion of soft, oatmeal-colored suiting pieces. (In general, the tailoring for both men and women looked good and relevant—more of that, please.) Kunz also nicely worked the western theme into the men s clothes, especially with her application of horsehair to jackets and parkas.
A last word re: parkas. At a time when many fashion houses have gone parka-crazy, it bears mentioning that Nicholas K has been turning out excellent versions of the hooded jacket for a while now, and there were more expert examples on the runway this morning. Together with Kunz s razored leather jackets, the parkas proved that outerwear is this brand s enduring strength.
